The carrier said that the connection would strengthen Hong Kong’s telecoms infrastructure and consolidate its position as a financial hub by providing higher capacity and resiliency.
ASE was launched in August and has a total carrying capacity of over 15Tbps. It also connects to Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore and is intended to meet demand for submarine bandwidth within Asia, which is due to grow at an average of approximately 40% per year from 2011 to 2018, according to NTT.
ASE’s route is designed to avoid earthquake prone areas taken by other systems south of Taiwan and it uses double armoured cable with two layers of high tensile steel strands for additional resilience.
“As the reliance on global network connectivity, fuelled by rising internet usage, reaches new heights in Hong Kong, businesses are seeking faster and more reliable network services. ASE will offer both unparalleled ultra-low latency performance to the region as well as high resiliency on natural disasters and support enterprises’ growth in particular financial institutions for which every millisecond counts in the highly competitive market,” said Brandon Lee, chief strategy officer at NTT Com Asia.
Other consortium members for ASE include PLDT of the Philippines, StarHub of Singapore and TM of Malaysia. The cable for the project was supplied by NEC Corp and Fujitsu.
The Japan to Singapore section of ASE offers less than 65 milliseconds latency, an advantage of more than three milliseconds over competing cables, according to NTT.
The carrier hopes that this route will prove particularly attractive to financial customers when linked to its existing global IP network.
NTT’s Tier 4 FDC is due to launch in 2013 and will co-locate the ASE landing node with the carrier’s global network.